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I just read news that Stanley Paris, the American sailor trying to take his custom-designed, custom-built Kiwi Spirit around the world alone in record time, has abandoned the adventure only after just getting going. The following is a brief report culled from various internet sites about the reasons behind the abandonment, and then a little bit of opinion on why I think the whole thing was silly in the first place…

Erik de Jong designed and built his own 52′ steel boat for Arctic expeditions. It’s called ‘Bagheera’, and you can go sailing with him! Erik was super cool to talk to – he and I have a lot in common, having grown up sailing with our dads. Erik has always known he’s wanted to design boats since he was a little kid, and followed that dream. He now lives in Halifax working most of the year for a shipbuilding firm, handling engineering and business contracts, and sails for 4 months in the summer on ‘Bagheera’ up to Greenland and the ...

About two months ago, an unexpected email landed in the Totem inbox. It was from Jessica Muffett, founder of Yachtworld, informing us we had been nominated for a 2013 Yachtworld Heroes award for our part in spreading the joy of boating by inspiring others to make the leap and embark on the cruising life.

You know the cliche- it’s an honor just to be nominated? There is absolutely no cliche here. I look at the inspiring people nominated for 2013 Yachtworld Heroes, and don’t feel worthy. They are my heroes: people like Jeanne Socrates, who continued undaunted to ...

We should note that Stanley Paris, after a bit of a weather delay, finally got away from St. Augustine, Florida, 11 days ago on a solo non-stop round-the-world voyage aboard his custom-built 63-foot cutter Kiwi Spirit. Paris, age 76, is trying to beat the “ghost” of Dodge Morgan by getting around in less than 150 days. He also wants to be the oldest to pull off a non-stop circumnavigation and is trying to do it while burning zero hydrocarbons.

The modern world being what it is, we’ll be able to follow Stanley’s voyage every step of the way. ...

Let the record reflect that Pascal Ott and Monique Christmann, the deadbeat French sailors who have plagued the otherwise cruiser-friendly community of Oriental, North Carolina, for the past year have at last moved on. Or rather, they’ve been dragged on. As has been reported on Oriental’s fantastic community website, TownDock, Ott and Christmann and their decrepit steel ketch Primadonna were towed out of the anchorage last month (see photo up top) by a transient Dutch cruiser, Martijn Dijkstra, who left them on a mooring at Morehead City. Most everyone in Oriental was happy to see the last of Primadonna...

Bernard Moitessier is remembered primarily for his famous 1968-69 Golden Globe voyage, in which he blew off a chance to win the first non-stop singlehanded round-the-world race and kept on sailing halfway around the world again to Tahiti to “save his soul.” But he is also remembered for wrecking not one, but three different boats during the course of his sailing career. As is documented in his first book, Sailing to the Reefs (Un Vagabond des Mers Sud in the original French), he lost two boats named Marie-Therese sailing on to reefs in the Indian Ocean and in the ...

Russ & Laurie Owen sat down with me on their catamaran ‘Nexus’ in Tortola last week. They had just completed the Caribbean 1500, and are on their way to St. Lucia now to sail around the world with World ARC. I warmed to Russ & Laurie straightaway in Portsmouth at the start of the rally – they’re just genuine, nice people! Russ is very proud of the refit he’s done on the boat – he’s an aerospace engineer by trade, and one look at the ‘guts’ of his boat will tell you that he’s thought it all through and then ...

Andre and Marie-Claude sailed in the Caribbean 1500 two years ago aboard their Moody ‘Dancing Lizard.’ This was a conversation I had with them over good French coffee and scrambled eggs aboard their boat in Hampton, VA before the start of the rally. Andre and Marie-Claude were two of my favorite folks in that event, and I see them popping up here and there on Facebook, cheering on their French-Canadian compatriots in this year’s rally! Thanks for breakfast guys, and thanks for chatting!...

I’ll probably always associate Hurricane Sandy and the sinking of the HMS Bounty with last fall’s cruise to the Carolinas and a Fort Lauderdale show that got a little scary just because Sandy’s eye passed by about 160 miles to the east. Soon after flying from Lauderdale to Gizmo’s super safe location in Myrtle Beach (lucky!), I was adding Bounty comments to an entry about how I’d first spotted the storm on a Furuno TZT. What I didn’t mention then was that I’m one of ...

These images come from cruising friend Jessica Rousseau, who has this to say about them:

“This selection of underwater images was taken in several different locations: Caribbean, New Zealand, Fiji, Mexico and South Minerva reef, (an atoll between NZ and Fiji). I chose to use black and white as an experiment to see if the impact of the underwater world was any less without its myriad colours. I found that monochrome allows you to experience an image with more feeling because of not being bombarded with an array of vivid colours. When viewing something ...